Researchers said men can suffer "brewer's droop" for more than a year after giving up heavy drinking.

Experts, who asked personal questions of 109 Spanish men, both while they were heavy drinkers and when they had scaled back their intake, found alcohol had a residual effect that lasted many months.

The academics, from Santo Tomas University in Colombia and the University of Granada in Spain, said their results “partially contradict those of other authors who argued that alcohol causes transient erectile dysfunction”.

Writing in the Journal of Sexual Medicine, they noted: “It does not seem to be just a temporary problem, because erectile ability was still affected after a year and, according to the results, did not seem likely to improve just with [alcohol] abstinence.”

The researchers also found that heavy drinkers tended to enjoy sex less and than those who only drank moderately, and were less likely to want it as well.

They wrote: “Alcohol users were found to have lower pleasure scores. To the best of our knowledge, no previous studies have related alcohol consumption with impaired sexual pleasure.”